The system table removal patch went through some significant changes thanks to alexpott and sun and is now ready. That's great! I got busy with creating a proper version for the temporary key-value store patch: this is a requirement for Views in Core and also would allow for a nice entity preview workflow if someone would write it. EntityFieldQuery has been rewritten, there are a six more tests to fix, doesn't seem like a big problem, it still needs a lot of documentation and new tests but bojanz is back from vacation and promised tests. It seems the date formats patch takes a reboot because of changed expectations, this is unfortunate. However, marcingy have rewritten the file usage system to be pluggable so that's another table down. There's ongoing work to convert vocabularies, text formats and contact categories to config, that's very good news. After EFQ v2 is complete, I will either work on entity storage system or the date formats issue or perhaps convert content types. One thing for sure, very busy weeks ahead.

There is a Views in Core spring end of October then BADCamp and sprints after BADCamp. During BADcamp, marcingy, Zlender and I plan to write the D8 MongoDB drivers and see whether all this works as we hope. We will have almost a month to push big things and then another four to push smaller things if they don't.

Back in Paris bojanz had this crazy plan of unifying the condition interfaces of DBTNG, EFQ and Views. This seems entirely possible, the new entity query condition interface has been copied as much as possible from the DBNTG condition interface, the difference are not significant. I wish we could use Traits. It would help a real lot. But, realistically, this is not an option when so many hosts still default to PHP 5.2 and offer 5.3 as an option only.

The big battle plan is that eventually (but before April 1) Views will use EFQ if it can and switch to a SQL backend if it can't. This would be the best outcome, given that EFQ already has a MongoDB implementation in D7 and with $and introduced in MongoDB 2.0 we can write one for the new one as well -- it would mean that most Views created would run just like that on MongoDB.

Ps. sun and beejeebus tripped on NULL not being a scalar, that was news to me as well, I have fixed the is_scalar docs on php.net. Even after this many years I am superb cautious and in awe that I can commit to php.net.

Will D8 seriously conform to 5.2 only? If it's scheduled for release next year and expected adoption rate is late 2013 into 2014- why not push for 5.4 compatibility now? Especially if it gives Drupal framework a better edge and makes things easier to deal with.